This is because, like all IP addresses that connect to our network, we check the requests that they make and assign a threat score to the IP. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.Īt CloudFlare we've not explicitly treated traffic from Tor any differently, however users of the Tor browser have been more likely to have their browsing experience interrupted by CAPTCHAs or other restrictions. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious.

On the other hand, anonymity is also something that provides value to online attackers. We believe this is so important that we offer our service for free through Project Galileo to protect politically and artistically important organizations and journalists against attacks that would otherwise censor their work. For instance, Tor is instrumental in ensuring that individuals living in repressive regimes can access information that may otherwise be blocked or illegal. Importance and Challenges of AnonymityĪnonymity online is important for a number of reasons we at CloudFlare believe in. Anonymity is assured because anyone monitoring the network would have a difficult time tying the individuals making the requests going into the black box with the requests coming out. Think of it like a black box: traffic goes into the box, is bounced around between a random set of relays, and ultimately comes out to connect to the requested site. Traffic is routed through a number of relays run across the Internet where each relay only knows the next hop (because each hop is enclosed in a cryptographic envelope), not the ultimate destination, until the traffic gets to the final exit node which connects to the website - like peeling the layers of an onion. Tor stands for 'the onion router' and that describes how the service works.

The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously.

How does tor browser work